One or more aspects of the present invention relate, in general, to the field of configuration databases, and in particular to creating and handling identification for a resource in a configuration database.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,290,949 B2 by Baker et al., which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, one of the primary goals for a configuration management database (CMDB) is to provide support for configuration items or resources as defined by the IT infrastructure library (ITIL). Along with representing and storing relationships between resources, another important purpose of the configuration management database is to provide a correlation mechanism between resources. For example, two management products may discover a single computer system, and yet call them different names. In order to provide a correlation mechanism, a notion of an object naming rule is used, defined as a set of object attributes which are uniquely identifying a given instance. With the quickly increasing complexity of IT environments, it may be seen that it is not possible to maintain one single model of the IT infrastructure, see Tivoli Common Data Model, for example, consisting from detailed definitions of object types with all the attributes and relations describing properties of the objects on which definitions of naming rules might be based. Every new flavor of the object might require a slightly different set of identifying attributes which requires new attributes to be added to the data model to build a base for a new naming rule, which very often requires model tables to be extended with new columns.